Announcements post #57: Faction Engagement Missions.

Autoposter

<pre>From: Ilyos, the Arbiter
Subject: Faction Engagement Missions.

We're very happy to announce that we've just finished and released the Faction Engagement Missions - The Cerebral Augment Chambers. Each faction houses one of these titanic contraptions, the purpose of which is to enhance the mental and physical capabilities of all faction members via their mindsims and wetwiring.
The Cerebral Augment Chambers (CAC for short) have been added to the LANDMARKS of your cities so that you may easily find them.
Interacting with the CAC is done through the 'CAC' verb. Inputting that by itself will list the interaction syntax for all operations.
You will want to start performing CAC TASKS in order to obtain Report Slivers. The current task list is:
1. Obtain Samples - You will be given a random kill quest that you need to carry out. These are level 65+ quests, so bear that in mind.
2. Maintenance and Upkeep - Similar to station missions, you will be required to obtain and deliver some commodities
3. Market Analysis - You will be required to fulfill a small number of MARKET ORDERs.
4. Combat Data - You will be required to kill a number of enemies in space incursions
5. Operating Costs - You will have to pay for monthly operating costs (10,000 marks)

At any time, you may check CAC TASKS to see your exact progress and requirements. You may undertake any number of these tasks, but you may only complete a certain task only once per RL day. Completing a task will grant you a Report Sliver that you may use to CAC AUGMENT <bonus>. CAC STATUS will show you what your faction's bonuses are. Currently, each bonus goes up to 5% in 1% increments (basically, each bonus can be augmented five times). Bonuses apply to all faction members and reset daily.

We will be working to continually develop this system with more tasks, bonuses and flavor in the near future. Have fun making your faction stronger and let us know what you think on the forums!</pre>

RocketCat

Looks great! I have the following issue:

You have completed "Obtain moss lizard samples".

---------------------------------< Task list >---------------------------------

Task ID Type Status

1 Obtain Samples Started [quest 0]

2 Maintenance and Upkeep Not started

3 Market Analysis Not started

4 Combat Data Not started

5 Operating Costs Not started

The quest doesn't seem to have completed, and I don't see any CAC syntax to deliver an Obtain Samples quest?

Ilyos

RocketCat said:

Looks great! I have the following issue:

You have completed "Obtain moss lizard samples".

---------------------------------< Task list >---------------------------------

Task ID Type Status

1 Obtain Samples Started [quest 0]

2 Maintenance and Upkeep Not started

3 Market Analysis Not started

4 Combat Data Not started

5 Operating Costs Not started

The quest doesn't seem to have completed, and I don't see any CAC syntax to deliver an Obtain Samples quest?

Should be fixed now!

Pink_Candyfloss

As discussed in tells, partial completion of market orders does not work for CAC Market Analysis completion. Neither does completing a full market order. The partial one was an existing market order. The full completion was one someone else put up for testing purposes in Scatterhome.

RocketCat

Yayyy! This gave me reason to go to Thait and learn just how scary those lizards are now. Content!

Any chance for a "pk" factional engagement mission? i.e. kill a player of an opposing faction, either via lawlessness or in a Cosmpiercer? INR delivery!

Keinna

Also, at least for Scatterhome, delivering goods for Maintenance and Upkeep is made difficult by having to deliver from Haven City and not Reynolds, and being unable to store goods at Haven.

Poet

also if you check quests the giver is "an undefined replica"

RocketCat

Poet said:

also if you check quests the giver is "an undefined replica"

I didn't give them permission to use my middle name!

Ilyos

Pink_Candyfloss said:

As discussed in tells, partial completion of market orders does not work for CAC Market Analysis completion. Neither does completing a full market order. The partial one was an existing market order. The full completion was one someone else put up for testing purposes in Scatterhome.

Aye, NPC orders only for that task. We now clarified that little issue and NPC orders now show up in MARKET ORDER LIST. We're aware there might not be enough of those to go around for now so we'll be monitoring that.

RocketCat said:

Yayyy! This gave me reason to go to Thait and learn just how scary those lizards are now. Content!

Any chance for a "pk" factional engagement mission? i.e. kill a player of an opposing faction, either via lawlessness or in a Cosmpiercer? INR delivery!

The initial direction of this system was for PvE only. We'll be looking at player feedback on this though and see what you all have to tell us.

Poet said:

also if you check quests the giver is "an undefined replica"

Going to fix this! Fixed!

Ilyos

Keinna said:

Also, at least for Scatterhome, delivering goods for Maintenance and Upkeep is made difficult by having to deliver from Haven City and not Reynolds, and being unable to store goods at Haven.

Checking this too

Update: the CAC now checks for the stations that belong to a capital as well.

Keinna

Ilyos said:

Keinna said:

Also, at least for Scatterhome, delivering goods for Maintenance and Upkeep is made difficult by having to deliver from Haven City and not Reynolds, and being unable to store goods at Haven.

Checking this too

Update: the CAC now checks for the stations that belong to a capital as well.

Thank you.

Pink_Candyfloss

Do the slivers need to be used on the 24 hour period you earn them or can you save up a stockpile to boost things at a later time? If so, is there a cap to how many you can store?

Poet

I had the same problem with the obtain samples task as @RocketCat had earlier, so it seems there is still an issue there.  Bug 2600.

Garryn

Pink_Candyfloss said:

Do the slivers need to be used on the 24 hour period you earn them or can you save up a stockpile to boost things at a later time? If so, is there a cap to how many you can store?

They reset daily, use them or lose them!

Pink_Candyfloss

Might want to alter the system and have the bonuses activate after the next sync and last the 24 hours between syncs. That way, nobody misses out during their playtime and the full 24 hour period across the world has the same bonuses. At present, people in the far east and middle east will do all the grunt work to stack the bonuses during their evening prime time and then Europe and America will reap the full 5% bonuses for their entire time playing.

Cubey

Pink_Candyfloss said:

Might want to alter the system and have the bonuses activate after the next sync and last the 24 hours between syncs. That way, nobody misses out during their playtime and the full 24 hour period across the world has the same bonuses. At present, people in the far east and middle east will do all the grunt work to stack the bonuses during their evening prime time and then Europe and America will reap the full 5% bonuses for their entire time playing.

It also means the closer to synchro you play, the less useful your slivers are. Why bother clearing a mission if its only bonus clears in 2 hours anyway?

The daily resets are a bit much in general. Maybe have 'em last 48 hours or so? Still requires cooperation between multiple players while not feeling like your efforts are constantly being undone by daily resets. The downside is that daily resets are much easier to code while my suggestion requires individual timers for each ticket/sliver.

Matlkael

I was thinking, maybe slivers could be stored. So, for example, if your Experience buff as a faction is already at 5%, all extra slivers put into that category get added to a storage account. At the next Synch, the system automatically pulls (at most) 5% from this storage (if there is enough in storage, that is) to keep the bonus going. At the game's year turn, everything in storage also resets to 0, so you can't keep piling onto it.

Rhindara

Right now, I don't find the system particularly appealing. With a maximum of 5% in each of 6 categories that reset daily, we'd need 6 people per org to do all 5 tasks so that we have 5% in every category, which isn't too likely since 4 of the tasks are comm or money sinks for an extremely short-term benefit. If we're going to keep 2 comm tasks and 1 10k task, plus the incursion task which is more of a variable cost, I'd want to ask that the bonuses last for up to a week at a time (even three days would be more palatable imo), and that the boosts are more (and possibly reduce the gain per sliver, depending on what the increase to the maximum looks like). I know you don't want to completely trivialize things like exp gain and damage and stats, but if we're only getting tiny boosts for potentially large amounts of money and/or time that only last a day, I'm not sure many people are going to want to bother with the system.

Azlyn

I really, really support additional faction content that helps give them functionality/meaning and that advances a sense of community. However, I feel that the current mission system is very much about the individual, and the faction just so happens to benefit from the good samaritans. At ~16 GMT in the most populous, tryhard, lol-admin-biased org, there have been no missions completed at all today, and I imagine there will continue to be low participation in this until we can consider some changes.

So while I didn't play Aetolia for very long, I believe that their ylem system is loosely similar to this mission system; i.e., your org has some earned currency (in this case, slivers) that can be used by the org to buy certain powers/privileges which lasts for some extended duration. I think this CAC system would benefit from a similar model, as has been somewhat similarly been suggested by others. That is, instead of each quest earning some small bonus as dictated by the individual, allow an accumulated sum of slivers to be invested by the faction into a reward. As an example, instead of spending 5 slivers each day, maybe you have to spend 50 slivers for a 10-day 5% XP bonus. I think this puts less onus on the players to have to complete these tasks daily, and instead it becomes an effort that the faction contributes to and can sustain as long as they have vested interest in some worthwhile bonus. 

So along those lines, these would be my suggestions:

- Add slivers bank, maybe make it capped or resetting

- Adjust the cost/duration of the bonuses (e.g., 5 slivers/day at 1% each = 50 slivers for a 10-day 5% bonuses)

- Create an investable power for the faction to spend slivers

- Consider adding a 'missionlog', to include both faction engagement and station missions, so as to credit participants but keep the spam out of the faction logs
- Consider adding other temporary powers/perks that the faction can buy

Ilyos

Thank you all for the suggestions! We will be making some tweaks to this system soon

RocketCat

Great updates today! I think CAC will definitely see action now.

I would like to echo something @Azlyn suggested, and that is to have something like CAC LOG. We'll probably want to implement some sort of faction reward system for doing CAC stuff, but right now it's difficult to track.

Ilyos

RocketCat said:

Great updates today! I think CAC will definitely see action now.

I would like to echo something @Azlyn suggested, and that is to have something like CAC LOG. We'll probably want to implement some sort of faction reward system for doing CAC stuff, but right now it's difficult to track.

Oversight on my part, that one.

RocketCat

Right, so CAC still isn't getting love. Some thoughts:

- CAC LOG would make the task of rewarding peeps way less cumbersome.

- CAC UNDERTAKE from anywhere, only have to be at the CAC to DELIVER. Again far less cumbersome.

- Tone down PAY COSTS a little bit, 7,500 instead of 10,000 for instance.

- Allow max 3-5 uninvested Report Slivers to carry over between syncs. That way it's easier to pool during the week and coordinate 'CAC days' for days of the week which see more activity.

Steve

RocketCat said:

Right, so CAC still isn't getting love. Some thoughts:

- CAC LOG would make the task of rewarding peeps way less cumbersome.

- CAC UNDERTAKE from anywhere, only have to be at the CAC to DELIVER. Again far less cumbersome.

- Tone down PAY COSTS a little bit, 7,500 instead of 10,000 for instance.

- Allow max 3-5 uninvested Report Slivers to carry over between syncs. That way it's easier to pool during the week and coordinate 'CAC days' for days of the week which see more activity.

I agree with the first three bulleted points, but I'd be happy with even 1 carryover sliver for the fourth. 3-5 would be fantastic.

edit: I would like to emphasize that CAC LOG would be hugely helpful for incentivizing participation; it's too hard to track everything for rewards.

Ilyos

Some of these have been implemented

RocketCat

LOVE the new CAC and the interactions its created so far around HACK CAC.

One point of feedback would be that the 'Racial signature' which gets logged -- while being cool flavor -- unfortunately kills the fun 'whodunnit' dynamic for basically everyone who's not Human.

Cubey

More like everyone. The playerbase is small enough that you can narrow the culprit down to 2-3 choices even for popular races like human or jin. And then it's just a matter of checking who's online.

Still I'm not a fan of profiling characters by race and gender like this because it means you actually have an advantage playing a popular race and get punished for playing an obscure one. I'm pretty sure that's not what we're trying to encourage here - maybe just let's remove the signature part from the logs? if you want players to point fingers, replace it with information of which faction the slivers were transferred to. That should spark some ingame faction tension that I know some folks are hoping for.

Ilyos

I like this suggestion

RocketCat

So aside from that one gripe above, I think everything seems mostly pretty solid now. No lost slivers? Yay. A chance in hell at keeping CAC full? Yay. Faction conflict? Yay.

The LAST thing I would mention would be the 'Maintenance and Upkeep' task. Some days this task is a total dud. 6 UMMs? Ouch. 5 disheet? Yeah, no problem. Simple fix would be just to remove arrays, sensors, and UMMs from the pool. Rglass and hdsastrium are also still pretty painful to spend, but if people really wanted to max out their slivers, they could sink those.

Cubey

2019/11/11 02:45:56 - Our Cerebral Augment Chamber has been breached and looted by an unknown entity. Unique faction signature - N/A.

That was fast.